It wasn't totally March madness for the North American video game industry last month by NPD Group's reckoning, as its latest monthly report confirms that sales at U.S. retail remained largely flat year-over-year ringing in $964.1 million USD. At this point you won't be surprised to learn that the PlayStation 4 remained the top-selling console for March, but NPD notes that console hardware sales as a whole suffered a 19 percent year-over-year decline to $253.2 million USD.

Fortunately, console software sales still managed to grow 8 percent from last year to $425.8 million USD, thanks to the strong performance of March's chart-toppers including Tom Clancy's The Division which already set a new launch day milestone for publisher Ubisoft. In fact, NPD confirms that The Division also enjoyed the best launch month for any Tom Clancy series title yet. If that wasn't enough for Ubisoft, Far Cry: Primal continues to capture to sales and manages to drop only to second place.

Another surprise comes in the form of Nintendo's high-defintion remake of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii U, which managed to overtake Grand Theft Auto V to be third best-selling game last month. Another Wii U exclusive made a fine accounting of itself in the form of Pokkén Tournament which managed to chart in NPD's software top ten, landing at a decent seventh place. To be sure, it was a good month for new releases overall with titles like EA's UFC 2 and Sony's MLB 16: The Show all performing well at U.S. retail.